CHAPTER XI.
Near the City of Charites.
THE MYSTERY OF THE “SLENDER BRASS.”
This chapter is a pendant to that on “Midas the Glorious.” It is an afterthought which my long familiarity with free reeds has given birth to. One day I chanced to buy a child’s toy, a little trombone, perfect in slide action, and in succession of tones. Following my habit of experimenting with reeds, pursuing therein the course of a lifetime’s devotion to such attractions, I naturally desired, childlike, to see the inside of this trombone. It contained a slide within a tube, and upon this slide a series of free reeds set tandem fashion; upon lengthening the trombone, each reed in succession was brought to the one air hole which alone was provided for the issue of the sounds from the series of reeds. For so small an instrument, merely a toy be it remembered, there was great power, and correct pitch.
By a freak of memory, Midas and his flute came to mind, and words of Pindar flashed through my brain with a new significance. Was the free reed used in the flute of Midas? that was the question. Pindar, as was stated, was himself familiar with the flute; he came of a family of flute players, and therefore his description has a more than casual purport, for we may be sure that he had clearly in mind every detail he directed attention to by his words, and knew everything affecting the instrument. Pindar, having stated how Maiden Athene fashioned the flute with its varied strain, and bestowed it on man, then proceeds to describe it and its musical sound. Of the sound of the flute he writes:—
Through slender brass it flows.
It had not occurred to me before to think of any distinct implication in the words; but now I question very much the pleasantness of a brass tube taken into the mouth, in length nearly two inches, with its vibrating tongue in action; not like a cup-piece outside the lips, as in the trumpet and trombone.
Fancy it: a brassy taste! Surely this was not the idea he would convey, of a player’s hot moist lips straining upon a slender tube of brass. We shall get his words more literally in prose:—
When it passes through the slender brass and through the reeds,—which grew near the city Charites, the city with beautiful places for the dance.